"In fact, it would be very easy to ‘prove’ Marx’s analysis to have been wrong, if experience had shown, for example, that the more capitalist industry develops, the smaller and smaller the average factory becomes, the less it depends upon new technology, the more its capital is supplied by the workers themselves, the more workers become owners of their factories, the less the part of wages taken by becomes (and the greater becomes the part of wages used for buying the workers’ own means of production). If, in addition, there had been decades without economic fluctuations and a full-scale disappearance of trade unions and employers’ associations (all flowing from the disappearance of contradictions between Capital and Labour, inasmuch as workers increasingly become the controllers of their own means and conditions of production), then one could indeed say that Capital was so much rubbish and had dismally failed to predict what would happen in the real capitalist world a century after its publication."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ernest_Mandel
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Ernest Mandel
Ernest Ezra Mandel (also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter; 5 April 1923, Frankfurt – 20 July 1995, Brussels), was a revolutionary Marxist theorist.
10 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Ernest Mandel →
Related Quotes
"Yes, he does indeed and again this is very positive. Our movement has defended this thesis for 55 years and was there…"
"The reformer Yeltsin represents the tendency which wants to reduce the gigantic state apparatus. Consequently he foll…"
"Not only have material wealth and the possibilities for freeing mankind definitively from the burden of meaningless, …"
"For Marx, ‘pure’ economic theory, that is economic theory which abstracts from a specific , is impossible."
"Capital, explaining the origins of the capitalist mode of production, points towards the inevitable historical declin…"
"By stating that the analysis of the laws of motion governing the capitalist mode of production necessarily includes a…"
"Precisely because Marx was convinced that the cause of the proletariat was of decisive importance for the whole futur…"
"When the dialectical method is applied to the study of economic problems, economic phenomena are not viewed separatel…"
"Capitalism subordinates men to machines instead of using machines to liberate men from the burden of mechanical and r…"
"(About Adriano Celentano) [...] He has the right to say what he wants, and I would have defended him even if he had s…"